Axiom Maths Program

Axiom is a free general purpose computer algebra system. It has been in development since 1971 originally as Scratchpad by researchers at IBM under the direction of Richard Dimick Jenks. In the 1990s it was sold to NAG and given its current name. In 2001 it was withdrawn from the market and released to Tim Daly, the project lead developer, under the Modified BSD License. In 2007, Axiom was forked into two different open source projects: OpenAxiom, and FriCAS.

Here I will explain how I have installed and run the program on my computer using the openSUSE operating system, if you are using a different operating system you may need to follow a slightly different procedure. This is purely a record of my own personal experience, I am not trying to write general install instructions.

I can now start the program by starting a command line widow and typing:

bash ax.sh

In addition to the command line window, when the program starts, a hyper-doc window is also created.

Problems

The program seems to work except when calling the draw function which seems to fail with:

>> System error:
Unknown bfd format

Also, although it will allow me to compile code, when I try to use it I also get: an 'Unknown bfd format' error.

This makes it hard for me to use this version of Axiom.

Computer Algebra Systems

This page is part of a set of pages devoted to my experiments with open source computer algebra programs in this case Axiom. These page start here where I have put some information about computer algebra systems.